An application is computer software that is designed to perform a particular task. Exemplary conventional applications include web browsers, word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, presentation applications, etc. Recently, due to the increased popularity of smart phones, tablet computing devices, and other portable computing devices, applications have recently been designed for execution on such types of devices, where the applications are designed to be user-friendly and perform relatively simple tasks. Typically, these applications are available for download from an application repository, where a user can search for and select one or more applications, and cause selected applications to be retrieved from the application repository and installed on the computing device of the user.
Many currently available applications are configured to access content from the Internet by way of a network connection and present such content to a user responsive to the user initiating or interacting with the application. For instance, applications have been developed to provide users with restaurant reviews for restaurants that are relatively proximate to the respective users. Accordingly, the application can take the location of the user as an input, access data by way of the Internet that is relevant to the location of the user, and generate a page that includes the data for presentment to the user.
Further, many applications can generate pages for presentment to a user that include data that is not accessible on the Internet. Such data may be generated by the application developer or retained in a network-accessible repository that is not indexed by a search engine. Currently there are hundreds of thousands of applications that are available in application repositories. Generally, pages generated by these applications are not able to be searched by users; instead, a user must install and execute the application to view such pages. To assist users in ascertaining information about the content of applications, developers of the applications can assign textual metadata thereto that can be retrieved when a search is performed. It is to be understood, however, that content generated by the applications during execution is conventionally not searchable.